A Rose and a Spark
| A Rose and a Spark | |
|---|---|
| Date of Cutscene: | 12 October 2017 |
| Location: | Unknown |
| Synopsis: | Summary needed |
| Cast of Characters: | 1326 |
The rain was cool that night, the oncoming dusk's light shadowed by overcast clouds. She waited in a motel on the edge of town, a woman on the run from everything she once held dear. She trusted her contact implicitly from earlier, more jovial times, the man a soldier by nature but a friend to her cause. It was treachery working for Intergang, she knew, but the lure of a more stable life drew them both in, her for the ability to achieve a better future with her as a leader, him for the curiousity of the novel challenge. She should've been a politician, he should've been a spy. But she didn't have the connections or the plans to make those connections, and he never read the right book. Both of them products of broken homes, hers broken by causes long dead but wounds still simmering, him from a circle of decay that spiralled through the generations. She expected a man from Apokalips that night, to make her someone more than flotsam. Someone to give her an anchor, someone to give her power, even someone to give her love. That's why the roses were to be his signal.
This game was simple to play, if one was only willing to trust their instinct. The intended contact hadn't been Braccato, instead of a Five Families representative that her platonic love promised her. Braccato pretended that Intergang and the Mafiasos of New York had ignored the request, to learn the signal from the contact. That was his game, always the hunted predator. After her contact had gone off carousing with a woman, after giving Braccato the location and code signal, he arrived at her motel room. He was dripping wet but the roses were dry in his gloved hand, an umbrella having saved them. It was a hint in the back of her mind that he was a gentleman, a real believer in chivalry. He came into the motel room, and closed the door behind him, a cool, sad smile on his face. She accepted the roses, her eyes bright until the last moment of realization when the garrote came out.
Some hours later, after the rain had passed, Volf Boiardi was at a bonfire under a bridge, one he had built himself, amidst the detritus and graffiti. It blazed slowly, as the image of the roses and their clashing colors stuck in his mind, the sun rising in the distance to beckon the angel of death back to paradise. He dropped the rose he had been saving into the flames, watching the red and green turn into priestly black within the fire. Man first toyed with fire, he reflected, to build all these things he's ever had around him. Fire, he was once told by his father, only destroys us if we toy with it.
Now, he realized, fire only burns us if we aren't involved in tending it.